Wednesday, 3 September 2014

KING TUBBY AND THE DECKCHAIR CHALLENGE

For no particular reason I can think of here is a piece about the joys of half-time entertainment that appeared in When Saturday Comes about ten years ago.

It is fair to say that half-time entertainment at the top
end of football is no longer what it was. The reason is simple -
nobody watches any more. Nowadays there are far too many things to distract
supporters down in the concourses. And who would not drink half-frozen lager and
watch highlights of the first half - even if it was 0-0 - when the alternative is trying to get your
head around the sight of 10 teams of squealing children playing five games of
football simultaneously across the width of the pitch?

Perhaps it is not such a great loss. Since the
apparent abolition of police dog display teams and regimental bands, half-time
entertainment can be subdivided into two distinct categories: the penalty prize and the other shit. The latter usually involves: inflatables, celebrities (or would be
celebrities) and tubby, pissed fans whose mates are in the stands nudging one
another and going, “Film it on your phone, Geggo, film it on your phone”.

Inflatable entertainment can be dealt with swiftly (and
should be, preferably with a hat-pin). Inflatables were abandoned by
football fans over a decade ago, but ever hip to what the new breed dig the
game’s rulers continue to use them at every opportunity. The feeling amongst
the power-suits seems to be that anything that is large, bouncy and filled with
gas is enormous fun. This will come as news to anyone who has ever watched
Eamon Holmes. Inflatable half-time entertainment arrives in many shapes and
sizes from the bull at Hereford to the giant dice currently being rolled about
in Premiership penalty areas as part of some inexplicable ritual presumably
connected with sponsorship money.

Perhaps the exemplar of inflatable
entertainment were Sky’s sumo wrestlers - a pair of giants in nappies who bumbled around the turf seeking out new and ever more adventurous homo-erotic poses. Buggery is something Rupert Murdoch is set firmly against. His company soon pulled the plug on the sumos. Or indeed out of them.

Celebrity appearances at The Riverside Stadium down the
years have included a folk singing family from Billingham and actor and
comedian Su Pollard. Pollard made the fatal mistake of standing in the centre circle and yelling “Hi-de-hi!” The
massed response was predictably Anglo-Saxon. And it was the same the second
time she did it, too.

The tubby pissed fan events come in myriad form. Some TPFs come
on in suits and take penalties against a reserve team goalkeeper who invariably
looks like John Burridge, (possibly because he is) for reasons the PA announcer
refuses to divulge. Others, in pairs, take part in a trivia quiz, or, in a
troupe, indulge in a humiliating aerobics routine lead by a women in a leotard
and spandex leggings who used to be on breakfast television.

The ultimate example of the tubby pissed fan genre, though,
was Hartlepool United’s infamous deckchair challenge. Sponsored by DFDS Seaways
this involved TPFs setting off from the halfway line and dribbling around
deckchairs before scoring into an empty net. Three attempts were allowed and
the fastest time counted. Incredibly one large bloke not only failed to find the net
at all, he also succeeded in falling over several times. Invited back for
another go the following week he repeated his abject performance, missing out
on a luxury cruise to Norway, but becoming a minor local celebrity.

Which brings us to the only half-time entertainment of
any merit - the ubiquitous junior penalty prize, popularised on ITV in the 1970s. This is quick, elegant and offers the
opportunity – rare in this day and age - to verbally abuse small children
without getting arrested. Across the country the pattern of the
penalty prize is much the same and so is the reaction of the crowd. Kids from
schools in rugged working class neighbourhoods are cheered to the rafters,
while those from the affluent suburbs had ridicule heaped upon there bourgeois
heads. The reaction of the children to the situation is never without interest.
On one occasion at Ayresome Park a boy, possibly from a school in Hartlepool
(rugged, but, well, frankly and unashamedly in Hartlepool and therefore the subject of derision) having experienced a
torrid build up to his penalty from the denizens of the Holgate End blasted his
kick into the top corner of the net and then celebrated by lifting up his
school jersey to reveal a Sunderland top beneath. This took some guts and, had
life been fair, triumph would have been his reward. Unfortunately life isn’t
fair. The penalty shoot-out ended all square. It went to sudden death. The boy
was forced to confront the Holgate End again. This time he missed. I bet he
still wakes up screaming.

1 comment:

I was at that Boro match. I think it was during the 1991/92 season, if memory serves. That penalty competition is one of my all-time favourite memories of Ayresome Park. I always admired the stones of the kid for revealing the Sunderland shirt but in common with everyone else I guffawed mightily and derisively when he missed penalty #10.

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.